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I think many of us could truthfully say that if we had known a bit more about the basics of Linux installs, we would have installed a little more wisely than we did initially. My intention here is call attention to some of these basics and make a few helpful suggestions that may aid new users in their first journey into Linux.

Things that could/should influence your partitioning layout:

1) Partitions closer to the outside of the hard drive disk, ie. at the top of your partition table and to the left in the Gparted graphic, are faster than partitions on the inside of the hard drive disk, or closer to the bottom of the partition table.

2) Smaller partitions are faster than larger partitions.

3) Swap partitions don't need to be any larger than 2X your system ram. And, the sum of system ram and swap shouldn't exceed 4 Gig. If it does, reduce the swap partition size to get back to 4 Gig. or less. If you have 4 Gig. of ram on a 32 bit system like Mint, make a very small swap partition anyway, as the kernel expects to have a swap partition available. Not having a swap partition slows the kernel down in certain situations. For this purpose, there is no need for the swap partition to be over 256 KB at most.

4) If you have more than one hard drive, split your swap partition up between all your drives, creating a small swap partition on each drive. Linux will recognize and combine them all and your swap will be much much faster when you need it. It is almost like a raid 0 set-up. Swap will strip across drives.

5) Journaled file systems like ext3 are much better at maintaining read/write data integrity in case of power failure or some other unexpected crash or failure.

6) Journaled files systems also represent more overhead to the kernel and take more space on the hard drive for the file system structure itself. There is no advantage to using a journaled file system on a partition that will rarely be written to. /boot is a good example of this. It is almost never written to, so if you use a separate /boot partition, it should be ext2 and not ext3.

7) If you use a separate /boot partition, it doesn't need to be more than about 256 MB. This still leaves plenty of space for extra kernels and boot notes.

8) Your data should be isolated from your main install to protect it and easily enable upgrades and reinstalls.

The truth of the matter is that all the installer routines that I am familiar with do a pretty poor job of doing a default install. They just aren't very smart. They work, and serve the purpose of enabling a successful install in most cases. But they don't install very smart. They usually put everything in one partition and spread it out across all the available space. Looking at the above list you can see this is a bad idea for a variety of reasons.

I guess due to natural curiosity and the understandable lack of familiarity with Linux, most new users will break their installs at least once in the first six months and need to reinstall. As most are aware, this leaves you in a position to loose your data or jump through lots of hoops trying to save it, if you have done a default install.

I am going to suggest two very basic partitioning schemes for general purpose desktops that will give you good speed, conserve hard drive space, and provide reasonable data integrity and isolation, and a safe upgrade path.

The first is the well know method of using a separate /home partition. All the user's data is in /home so putting /home on a separate partition effectively isolates it from the rest of the install, the part that most often breaks. This eases upgrades too, although it isn't a perfect solution.

The other method uses dedicated data partitions that aren't part of the Linux install at all. This is the safest, fastest and most flexible method, and makes for almost painless reinstalls and upgrades, but is a little more difficult to set up initially.

You can have as many or as few data partitions as you see fit. You would mount them in your /home directory, let's say as Multimedia, Pictures, and Documents, as an example. They would be easily available in your /home folder but the data itself would be safely on its' own partition or partitions. If you had a Windows XP install, one of your data partitions could be formatted NTFS so that it could be easily shared.

You could of course combine the two methods I showed above, but I see no advantage in doing so. You could also have a separate /boot partition, which would make either install slightly faster, but with modern equipment you probably wouldn't notice the difference.

This was not written to give you step-by-step instructions on how to accomplish these set-ups but to give you something to think about before you jump into your first install, or perhaps your first reinstall. :-)

Thanks for the info Fred. Maybe they should put a "read me first" file in the live CD's and have this in it. ;o) I know I would have done it different "if" I had a better understanding of this very topic. And it would have saved me a ton of time when I did the install and the 3 re-installs on my son's laptop. But hey you live and learn, right?

Hi, i would install mint v4 and upgrade to v5 in a few weeks. Actually usin windows (no need to keep this if winehq works :) ) on a 250gb sata1, 3gb ram and saving my photos on sata2 and other media on sata3.

If i install an application where is the default installation path? / or /home ?same question with winehq / or /home?... if the default or lets say the recommended installation path is just / ... this isn't much of space for my applications after all?

Your first config is the one to go with :swap 1Gb (2Gb would be even better)/ 20Gb/home the restSoftwares in Linux take much less disk space than in windows. With 20Gb you'll have plenty of space to install all the softwares you'll ever need.You don't need a share partition. If your other sata disks are NTFS, Mint will be able to read/write them with no problem.

This is the best and simplest one to install that you are considering. I would suggest that you trim your root back to 10 - 12 Gig. however. I have everything but the kitchen sink on my install of KDE, which is larger than Gnome, and my / weighs in at 7 Gig. Unless you are going to do a lot of development work and compile very large programs, you will never use 20 Gig. You are just slowing your install down for no good reason. You can add to your partition later from your unallocated space if you find that you need it.

If you are doing a lot of development work, none of the partitioning schemes in this thread would be appropriate for that kind of work.

Fred

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and each time expecting a different result.

Democracy is 2 wolves and a lamb voting on the menu. Liberty is an armed lamb protesting the electoral outcome. A Republic negates the need for an armed protest.

Fred wrote:4) If you have more than one hard drive, split your swap partition up between all your drives, creating a small swap partition on each drive. Linux will recognize and combine them all and your swap will be much much faster when you need it. It is almost like a raid 0 set-up. Swap will strip across drives.

Thanks, Fred. I've always felt a bit sheepish that I have swap partitions on each of my hard drives because folks like to say that you only need one! This made me feel better!

I know you cant use an NTFS partition for home cos I tried it before but can you use an NTFS partistion for say /home/documents? That would save me useing that ext2 driver for windows which I can never get to work quite right.

I would not recommend using a NTFS partition as a /home partition, as the performance of ntfs-3g is still not up to par. I would rather edit /etc/fstab to make it mount with read/write in /media/somefolder, make a separate topic if you want help with that.

You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.--Dean Martin

You are thinking in Windows bloat terms. All the software you mentioned will easily fit into a 10 - 12 Gig. / with space to spare. If you want to add a couple Gig. to make yourself feel comfortable then thats fine, go to 14 Gig, Anymore would be just plain wasteful, and would slow the install down for no reason.

The virtual machines are stored in /home. You have two options here. Either have a big /home or put your virtual machines on a separate partition mounted in /home. I favor the second method.

In your case I would have a /home of about 10 Gig. and one or more data partitions to hold all the big stuff.

I would remind you that there is no law or rule that says you have to pre-allocate all your hard drive space. Allocate the space that you need, and leave the rest unallocated. you can always come back later and add unallocated space to the partitions that need it. Make your partitions large enough to hold you for the next six months. Remember, smaller partitions are faster partitions. Then come back and add to them as necessary over time.

Fred

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and each time expecting a different result.

Democracy is 2 wolves and a lamb voting on the menu. Liberty is an armed lamb protesting the electoral outcome. A Republic negates the need for an armed protest.

Hey Fred, I remembered you saved me from a near disaster a few months back, lol. I wanted to install and check out the LM 5 Beta. So I decided to look at the board to see if I can find any tips on re-partitioning my HD, and I'm glad I stumbled onto this post before I got started with my first Linux upgrade/re-installation....Well first, I went and moved all of my data onto an external HD, and while that was going, I perused this thread along with another thread dicussing partition methods, took some pointers from each and then I got to work...

I tinkered around with GParted using these points:

I only gave my swap partition 8MB since I have 4GBs of mem in the system; Later on I set the swappiness to 0.

I've gotten familiar enough with VirtualBox and no longer saw the need for a dual boot, so I set up a separate partition for the Virtual Machine closer to the front of the disk.

Created separate partitions for the /usr, /opt, and /var folders.

For quicker, easier upgrades and re-installations in the future, along with the VM partition I've also created separate partitions for the "Documents", "Downloads", "Music", "Pictures", and "Videos" folders in my /home folder.

Looks ok..... might be a bit of over kill for a simple general purpose desktop, but thats ok.

The only thing I see that I would change is the swap partition size. A 32 bit system like Mint can only address 4 Gig of memory total. Actually a bit less. Ordinarily you would not want the sum of your physical RAM plus swap to exceed 4 GIG. In your case you have 4 Gig of physical RAM already. The kernel expects to have a swap partition or file so you should have one even though you can't use the space in it. I would reduce the size of the swap partition to no more than 256 MB. 128MB would work just as well. Of course the 8 Gig. in swap isn't hurting anything since you can't use it anyway, but it is a bit wasteful, if you could use it elsewhere.

Fred

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and each time expecting a different result.

Democracy is 2 wolves and a lamb voting on the menu. Liberty is an armed lamb protesting the electoral outcome. A Republic negates the need for an armed protest.